


Mi CASA

by JoCarthage



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Iron Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Supernatural, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Child Abuse, Child Neglect, F/M, Foster Care, Kid Fic, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mentors, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Racism, straight jacket
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-16 18:48:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12348525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoCarthage/pseuds/JoCarthage
Summary: In the mid 80s, Dean and Sam Winchester are put into foster care in North Dakota for a few weeks while John Winchester is 2 states away in jail. They are assigned a Court Appointed Special Advocate by the name of Bucky Barnes, recently deprogrammed forced-Hydra assassin and current mechanic looking for a way to give back to his community while he's in witness protection. Decades later, when Dean's life takes a pause to be there for Cas, Dean meets Miles Morales and tries to help him when he's unjustly put into the system.





	Mi CASA

**Author's Note:**

> There are Court Appointed Special Advocate programs in real-life, not just fic, and they always need volunteer mentors who can spend a few hours a week with a foster child or teen. You can learn more here: http://www.casaforchildren.org/site/c.mtJSJ7MPIsE/b.5301309/k.9D58/Volunteering.htm
> 
> PS: It looks like Ao3 posted this multiple times while giving me error pages; then it took a long while to delete those extras once I hit DELETE like a cyberwoman. We're back to just 1 "Mi CASA"; apologies to the spam.

“What do you want with Sammy?” 

The little boy with his arms braced on either side of the door reminded Bucky Barnes of another blond spitfire; but that was 40 years and several lifetimes ago.

Bucky squatted down, resting his elbows on his knees, making sure to keep the metal prosthetic behind his other hand. Even though it was gloved, kids always had a range of reactions and he wanted Dean’s first impression to be about something other than his prosthesis. 

The kid was skinny. If he was Sammy’s brother, according to the boys’ case file he had reason to be.

“I’m Sammy’s CASA, do you know what that is?”

Dean stared for a long moment, then shook his head, overgrown hair getting into his eyes. He clawed it back behind his ears and grumbled:

“‘Casa’ means ‘house’ in Spanish, but I don’t think that's it.” 

Bucky’s eyes widened a fraction; he might have spoken just enough Gaelic when he was Dean’s age to keep up with Stevie’s Ma, but he’d been an immigrant kid in a melting-pot city, not raised on the backroads of the American midwest, hundreds of miles from the nearest airport. He replied, voice faster now he knew Dean could keep up:

“That’s right and you’re right—it stands for Court Appointed Special Advocate,” Bucky said, spelling the letters out in ASL. Dean’s eyes jerked down to the movement, but he forced himself to look back at Bucky’s eyes and he didn’t move away from the door. _Where was this kid’s foster Mom?_ Bucky couldn’t help wondering, as he made eye-contact with a massive concrete gnome behind a potted plant to the left of the porch. He had the feeling it wasn’t the only gnome on the premises, though he couldn’t see any others. These kids had been removed from their Dad for neglect, but if this placement was letting an eight-year-old run the house, it wasn’t going to last for long if Bucky had anything to say about it. He continued:

“That means a judge asked me to make sure Sammy’s getting what he needs: that this is a good place for him, that he likes his school; I speak-up for him in court and spend time on the weekends getting to know what he’s interested in.”

“What Sammy needs is to go back to Dad; that’s what I need too. He’s going to come get us.” Dean said, voice certain.

Bucky sighed internally, since he couldn’t tell Dean his Dad was in lock-up for arms-trafficking 2 states away, nor that he had waited 4 days into his jail sentence to tell someone he’d left 2 kids locked in a motel room in South Dakota. The file had said Dean had been found cleaning a clean rifle while Sammy watched TV, subsisting on cereal. They’d found a dozen guns stashed in the room; they were all in lock-up, in the same jail as their Dad.

Dean sucked a breath through his teeth and gestured to Bucky’s gloved hand:

“Did that happen in the war?” He wondered what a kid so little knew about war, but decided to use his regular answer: 

“Yes.” 

Dean’s eyes widened but he didn’t run. They didn’t need to know which war. Bucky made a decision.

“How about this Dean: I don’t make promises and I don’t get to make the final decision, but if I see from you 2 that this isn’t the place you should be, you’ll get to let me know how you want the judge to be told. I’m a volunteer, so they tend to listen to me.”

Dean seemed to consider this. Then he tilted his head and asked another question, the one Bucky had been dreading: “Do I have a CASA?”

Bucky paused and then shook his head. “Not right now, but,” And he made a snap decision he would need to get his supervisor to review and approve, but this kid’s green eyes were digging right in under his collarbone, 

“How about today, we’ll all 3 do something together, here in the house and I’ll see what I can do.” He turned on a high-watt smile, hoping that might help. "I brought cards,” Bucky said, holding up a deck of Notable Women of the American Revolutionary War cards. Green eyes narrowed and Dean’s smile ticked-up.

—

  
Dean had eventually let Sammy come out of his room and downstairs to play some “friendly” games of hold’em. Bucky thought he should have been glad they were playing for pennies otherwise he would have blown all his gas money getting suckered in by Dean’s innocent smile. Sammy wasn’t the shark his brother was—yet—but he followed Dean’s cues beautifully, even staging a mini-tantrum to try and distract Bucky from noticing his inside straight was abut to get filled.

After a few hours, he said goodbye to the boys, tracked down their foster Mom — she’d been taking a smoke-break the entire time out back — and scheduled the next meeting with her. 

On the drive home, he thought about his war answer, to Dean’s question about his arm. It wasn’t appropriate to put his stuff on a kid’s shoulders, but he felt bad lying to him. But the whole story — about the world war, being captured, getting experimented on, getting saved, being lost, being found in the worst way possible, waking up in the US with no idea who he was, getting picked-up and randomly, miraculously, getting into a deprogramming program. He’d been the only man in a class of women who’d escaped a FLDS compound and his deprogramming had covered more information about make-up and secretarial skills than he thought he’d ever use, no matter how long his life seemed to be now. But then he’d been put into witness protection, shipped off to Fargo, North Dakota, and well, here he was, working as a mechanic during the week and trying to do some good on the weekends.

When he got home, he used his wall phone to call Natalie, his CASA volunteer supervisor for a debrief.

—

“How’d it go with those two little boys, the, what, Colts? Derringers?”

“The Winchesters. Those are some tough cases for such little kids,” Bucky started, pulling his glove off with his teeth and the elastic from his hair. He shook his head, grateful for the release, knowing it would sound like the wind or static over the phone’s beige plastic mouthpiece.

“I wasn’t impressed with foster Mom, she was barely there during the visit, no protection, no provision of care.”

Natalie was an old hat at this kind of thing and knew the right questions to ask:

“Enough to risk them moving someplace worse?” Bucky squeezed his eyes shut and counted to 10. Natalie knew what she was doing, forcing him to remember the real world that these boys lived in, not some kind of fantasy from the 1920s with Steve’s Ma and hot soup, all before the crash and all that came with it. He replied; 

“I think those boys could survive in the woods for weeks, if not months at a time. I went to the bathroom and when I came back, I caught Dean going over how to skin a rabbit with Sam—“

“Isn’t Sam 4?” Natalie asked.

“Yeppers. Dean was demonstrating with a plastic fork on a stuffed rabbit; it looked like a dog toy, it wasn’t Sammy’s,” Bucky hastened to add. All the same, he heard Natalie’s composure break, for just a minute, and felt a sick kind of satisfaction.

“Alright, so no recommendation of moving them. What are you doing at the next visit?” she asked. 

“We agreed to go walking in the woods; Dean wanted to bring the guns and kept asking me where a special one was, but I told him I didn’t know. Let’s keep me not know, ok?”  
  
“You got it. You’re going to do good with these kids. Any,” and here she paused; she knew he wasn’t shy about his prosthesis but also decades of training working with people with tempers had trained Natalie to respond a certain way to uncomfortable topics:

“Any questions about the arm?”  
  
Bucky shook his head, knowing the mouthpiece would make his voice modulate as he spoke, dopplering like a fighter jet strafing truth over a village. “Dean asked, real-quick, probably checking me out for Sammy, but he let it pass. I think when their shoulders come down from their ears, they’ll be asking a lot more questions," and he chuckled, "If I had to bet, I’d guess they’d think it’s far out and super-cool. They don’t seem like kids who are scared of much,”

“Attachment issues?” Natalie asked; risk-taking and risk-seeking behaviors were pretty normal in kids who didn’t have good boundaries.

“Oh yeah,” Bucky said, voice emphatic. “I don’t think Dean’s ever loved anyone but his Dad and he’s not entirely sure his Dad loves him.” Then he paused, seeing Dean’s little body, arms stretched across the doorway, baring his way to Sammy. “That’s wrong, I’m wrong, he loves Sammy more than life.”

“I’m hearing a lot about Dean, Mr Buchanan. Weren’t you supposed to only be a CASA for one of those boys?” He could hear a grin in Natalie’s voice. Like most other CASAs, he was a soft-touch.

“I was getting to that. Any chance I can get get added to Dean’s case, say at the next hearing?”  
  
He could hear her laugh and wondered how long she was going to make him wait before telling him yes.

“I’ve already drafted a note for the clerk; we’ll get you on the judge’s calendar. In the meantime, just make sure the foster Mom knows you’re open to taking both of them on your forest wanderings.”  
  
“Got it.” Bucky said. His eyes strayed towards his pea-green fridge, thinking of his dinner of cold-cuts and a few bottles of Miller. Then his empty single bed, his reading shelf, and his glorious, uninterrupted late night electricity. He did not miss forced covert work, not one bit, no sir-ee.

“Go on,” Natalie said to the silence on the phone as Bucky sidestepped away from reality. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Thanks, Natalie.” Bucky said, and hung up.

—

“Did you see his arm?” Sammy asked, bouncing on Dean’s bed and making an almighty mess of the pillows the woman they were staying with had just re-arranged around him into some kind of soft prison before she went to her room and shut the door. At least Dean had taken his shoes off of him before he’d clambered up onto the mauve duvet and started scattering babygirl pink pillows all over their closet of a shared room.

“Yeah, I did Sammy,” Dean said, eyes wandering to the bookshelf, Sammy continuing to bounce, getting higher and higher, the springs squealing on the down-push. He wondered if he could get Sammy to go to bed early enough he could get back to the chapter book he’d been working on. Meg Murry was just about to get some space from her brother and he wanted to see how she did it.

Then he had his arms full of sleepy, hyped-up, squirmy brother. He caught his balance before he fell over into the book case, and tried to grin at Sammy. The single bulb in the room made it hard to see too clearly now it was dark, but he Sammy seemed happy, and that was enough for now. 

“Do you think he’s a superhero, Dean? Do you?” Sammy asked, wriggling to stand on his own two feet before plopping down on the carpet and plucking at it, eyes down shyly.

“Do you think he’d shoot lasers if we asked him nicely?”  
  
Dean collapsed beside him, leaning his shoulder against his younger brother’s, content he was ok. “I think he might Sammy. But let’s wait to ask him until after we get back from the forest, ok?”  
  
“Ok,” Sammy said, and gave a big yawn. Dean hustled him up and under the covers again, leaving him one good pillow. He sat under the lamp, squinting at the book for one minute, maybe two, when Sammy mumbled:

“It’s so bright, Dean,” and flailed out towards the light. Dean bit his lip and punched his fist into the thick rug, but reached-up and turned off the light. Before he got into bed, he brushed hair off of Sammy’s forehead and said:

“Go to sleep, Sammy. It’ll be ok.”

—

The next week, Dean made plans. They would tell the woman they were staying with they’d seen Bucky coming up the driveway, she’d wave them out, and then they’d make a run for it, catch a bus towards the city, and get to Bobby or someone. Anything was better than just sitting here, waiting. There wasn’t even school to distract them — the district said they didn’t have their vaccination records, so they didn’t have any way to enroll them unless they wanted to get poked a bunch. Sammy’s face had screwed up when the woman they were staying with said that, and Dean had wrapped his arms around him and glared. She said she’d schedule it for next week, but here they were living inside of next week, and no appointment.

Today was their breakout day, Dean was on the window of their second-floor bedroom, legs hanging over the edge, chapter book in his lap. But just when he was thinking of telling Sammy to grab his back he saw a big black car pull-in and there Bucky actually was, walking up the driveway and he had —

“Is that a water gun?” Dean shouted down, voice betraying just a bit of his excitement. He kept most of it inside, where it unmockably safe. He could hear Sammy avalanching down the stairs, but he kept his butt firmly planted on the sill.

“Yeah, Buddy, it is,” Bucky called up, and squirted the water towards him. Dean tumbled back inside onto his twin bed, laughing, and ran down stairs to find Sammy struggling with the lock. He leaned over the wriggling boy and opened it, letting Sammy race to Bucky to get first pick of his plastic arsenal. Bucky fired his big gun at the the wheels of the woman’s car where the stream cleaned off a crust of dirt. Dean stood in the doorway and watched the water flow across the asphalt, thinking of the last blood he’d cleaned off the motel carpet. 

Dean walked forward across the porch carefully. Bucky watched him, eyes knowing, and knelt, handing the gun to Sammy and pulling his black tactical backpack off his back. 

“Dean, I wasn’t sure what kind of piece you preferred,” he said, voice even, and pulled out 3 waterguns: a handgun with a thick, black grip; a bubbly-looking one with a purple reservoir and a cartoonishly large snout, like a musket from TV; and a slick sniper-rifle-looking thing, done in blue with sparkles.

He reached for the rifle and Bucky’s eyes widened a little. Dean hesitated, wondering if he should act more like a little kid, but Bucky finished the motion for him, putting the long gun into his hands. Dean felt steady for the first time in days; his brain knew the weapon was fake, but his chest loosened and his hands stopped shaking. He started to work it over, seeing how the trigger worked, where the water repositories went, how to fill them, not noticing Bucky’s watchful eyes.

“I’ve got a couple of gallons of water in my bag, so we can refill on the go but — Sammy!” Bucky said, voice carrying even though he didn’t raise it. Sammy lowered his bright-orange watergun, which had been pointed squarely between the eyes of a particularly troubling gnome.

In an even quieter voice than he usually used, Bucky said, “Let’s get into the woods before we use up all our water. Give me a second,” he told them, and stood, piling the unclaimed guns into his backpack as Dean and Sammy waited, semi-at-attention, as he walked up the pealing-white steps and onto the front porch. He knocked on door frame and the women they stayed with answered.

They had a conversation, Bucky looking over his shoulder at them. She nodded, pointing to Dean, and Bucky handed her something, and she nodded. Dean felt stiff, cold all of a sudden; _Were they trying to separate them?_ He knew he should have chosen the kid gun.

He was nearly shaking when Bucky got back to them, but Bucky herded them towards a big, yellow field, marching in a line towards the copse of trees. Dean could only see the ground in front of them. But nothing bad happened, and he started to see a little more, pay attention to the woods the way his Dad had always taught them — it was fall and they were so, so many colors, the ground smelled like salt and cinnamon when they stepped on it. He thought he should try to help Bucky answer Sammy’s incessant questions which he now realized had been the only conversation for at least 10 minutes it took him to get back from wherever he’d been in his head: 

“What’s that? Why’d that bird do that? Why’s that tree so tall?”

Bucky had been answering them gamely — “That’s a bush, I don’t know what kind but we can look it up in the library; I think you scared it with your gun, Sammy; because there’s a spring, right over there, see it’s water?”— but he’d also let Sammy get in front and let Dean walk behind, giving him some space with his thoughts.

He moved faster, brushing past Bucky to see Sammy, who turned to grin at him and say:  
  
“I think there’s rabbits in here, Dean, want to catch them with me?”  
  
“Don’t be a freak, Sammy, we don’t need to catch rabbits,” Dean said like a normal kid would, stretching his mouth into a grin over at Bucky, wondering if he looked like a skull or not.

Sammy’s face crumpled at the insult, voice coming out high and whiney: “I’m not a freak, Dean.”  
  
Dean was drawing in a big breath to say something, anything, to make Bucky believe he was a good older brother, a normal older brother, someone Sammy deserved to have in his life, when Bucky squatted down with them.

“You know, I don’t think that’s a rabbit warren, Sammy. It’s close — it’s a badger’s hollow. Let’s leave it alone, badgers are pretty ornery. Then we can use those guns a little.” He turned to Dean, gesturing him and Sammy to a bright patch of sun in a circle of tall trees. Then he pointed:

“Try hitting that knot, up there,” and he pointed to a knot, only about 10 feet up a tree and to the right.

Dean lifted the rifle and shot it, dead center. 

Bucky clapped, eyes bright. “Ok, let’s try something harder — that red leaf, yep, the only one on that branch.”  
  
And Dean hit it, knocking it off the stem. Bucky broke into a run, catching the leaf with his left hand right before it hit the ground. He walked back, and Dean couldn’t stop staring, because his fingers were _metal_. And they _moved_.

He’d met hunters who had prosthetics, rough, plastic things the VA gave them, seen some veterans by the side of the highway with missing limbs who couldn’t even get those, but he’d never seen one that _moved_. Bucky sat, right there on the dirty floor of leaves, the spicy-rich-warm smell of them around the three of them, and twirled the leaf, sun-to-shadow-sun-to-shadow between his metal fingers before presenting it to Dean. 

Dean didn’t move, staring. Sammy was staring too, but mostly at the leaf; Bucky had moved fast and was spinning the leaf even faster. Sammy reached out to touch Bucky’s silver hand, and the leaf stopped spinning. Bucky’s voice was low, even:

“Sometimes, we lose things and we don’t get them back,” he said, “sometimes that’s a good thing, and sometimes it just is.” He pulled his motorcycle glove off his hand and flexed it, letting them look. Sammy put out a tentative finger, pushed it in the middle of his palm until his finger flexed back, and then yanked it away.

He turned to look at Dean and whispered: “It’s cold.”

  
“Yep,” Buckly said, “And sometimes things that are a part of us aren’t always nice. But they can be useful.” And he gently lifted the rifle from Dean’s unresisting arm, and shot, pow-pow-pow-pow-pow and 5 perfectly red leaves fell down from 5 different trees. Then he handed the rifle back to Dean.

“Sometimes we get to choose what we keep; that’s the best thing in life. But sometimes, we don’t, and there are still good lives to be had after bad things happen.”

—

“Thanks for the court report, Mr Buchanan; I had a question about the placement answer.”

Bucky had been waiting for this, and he still wasn’t sure he’d written the right thing. He let Natalie keep going.

“You said the foster Mom is nearly never there, seems to be feeding and housing them and not much else, and they’re still not in school because she hasn’t scheduled their vaccinations. But you recommend to the court that they stay with her?”  
  
Bucky rubbed his face, keeping his metal hand gentle on the receiver, knowing that if he snapped it, none of the office supply places in Fargo would be open after 8pm.

“Getting to the bone of it, I don’t think the boys are going to stick around. Their Dad made bail—“

“How did you—“ Natalie was raising her voice; a first.

Bucky kept his level: “I called the courthouse to check. I can do that, it’s not against the rules.”

There was judgy silence, like maybe the rules were being amended as he spoke.

“You think the father is going to kidnap the boys?”  
  
Bucky was shaking his head. “Maybe the judge will see it that way, but the father, I think, truly loves them. He mostly provides for them. They’re self-possessed, confident, and they're not going to accept being taken away from him. Well, maybe Sammy would. But I think it would kill them to separate them — and I'm not being hyperbolic, I think Dean would actually die trying to get back to Sammy. I think he’d walk through fire and over rivers and he's so little, he would die. I think they need so much more help than they can get in this state. I’d like to tag them in the system, give Dean my number to give me a call next time they're in California or New York, some system with real, actual resources for traumatized kids rather than the shitshow we've got here, and then try to see if we can get them picked up."

“You can’t be their caseworker, Mr Buchannan. You don't have the training.” Natalie's voice was cold and professional; it gave Bucky the willies every single time, but it was just part of the social worker training. Sometimes they just started reading out of their Masters’ program scripts and it was like watching someone get picked to pieces by an interrogator. Except this wasn’t about the location of a bomb or the source of a leak; it was about two little boys, whose lives were really hard through no fault of their own. Maybe that's why Natalie’s voice was so hard, because she knew it too: they had a long road to travel before they would have a chance of getting out.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to be. I’m with them while their case is open, and I’m keeping to all of the rules and regulations around being their Court Appointed Special Advocate. But once their case is closed, I’m going to try to get word through to their Dad that I’d like to stay in their lives, the way we’re allowed to.”

There was a rustle on the other end of the phone, like Natalie was taking notes. “So you're sticking with your court report suggestion that they stay with their current placement?”  
  
“Yes,” Bucky replied, deciding not to dig himself any deeper.

—

John came to get the boys a week later, throwing nickels at their window and waiting for Dean to lower Sammy down the side of the house and into his arms. He gave them them big hugs before they crouch-walked to the car. Dean fell asleep in the back of the Impala, Sammy tucked into his side, and _A Wrinkle in Time_ inside the pillowcase of the only good pillow they’d had.

Bucky wouldn't see the Winchester brothers for three decades.

—

The line crackled but Sam could fill in everything technology was keeping from him about Dean's voice; he sounded good. He heard him mutter:

“Siri, shut that AC/DC off.” And the background noise settled to the dull roar of the highway.

Sam repeated his question: “What’s your plan?” he asked and Dean said, this time at a normal volume:

“I’m going to try to stick it out here for a year, there’s enough stuff to handle within driving distance of Carthage, NY with the Amish ghosts and Appalachian yetis and shit.” His voice got quieter, but Sammy could still make it out. “ I, I could use a cool down. I’ve been running pretty ragged and Cas—“

Sam nodded, fingers tightening on the receiver. He knew Dean blamed himself for Cas being in the institution in middle-of-nowhere Eastern Pennsylvania. While the prognosis wasn’t great, a year for rehab after he came out of whatever had made him Emanuel was what the doctors had suggested. They still didn't know if the angel had retained any of his powers, they thought he had, but he didn't seem to be able to access them. Having a Winchester around, if only to dissuade others from trying to exploit Cas’s current innocence, seemed to be worth it in Dean’s head. Things were quiet in the world, for now, and Sammy didn’t get why Dean wanted off the road, but he could respect it.

“You’re just going to be fighting monsters alone?” Sam asked, fiddling with the edge of his jacket. He was in a rest stop bathroom, face still stinging from the nearly-dry shave he’d just given himself.

“I was thinking of getting a gig, something under the table and,” and here Dean sounded almost embarrassed. The man who could walk into any strip club in the world and be happy as a clam, something was making him sound blush-voiced.

“I’ll only go out if it’s something serious, but I was thinking, I might try to give something back, you know, the normal way.”

“Like a soup kitchen, or something?” Sam asked, putting his razor back in his bag and getting ready to unlock the distressingly concave double-bolted door

“I was thinking something a little heavier, maybe something with kids,”  
  
“Well, if you have any IDs left without a felony on them, good for you, I guess.”  
  
Dean grumbled and got off the phone and Sam was left facing the next leg of his trip. He’d call Dean in an hour, listen to some music with him, talk over the case. He wondered what kind of volunteer gig Dean was thinking of as he put the setting sun in his rearview.

—

Dean had lunch with Cas every day, picking up work with one of those handyman apps, and spent his evenings going through 30 hours of training, a grueling interview about how he was raised, and a full background check, but here he was, choosing a kid to be a Court Appointed Special Advocate to. He’d tried hard not to lie or fake any of his documentation, he didn’t want to mess them up, make their process more or less safe. 

The training had been, rough. He’d had to learn learn about neglect that got so bad kids were removed from their homes, what drug use looked like in this corner of the world, and how many parents couldn't feed their kids. He’d been surprised how common going back to parents was, that the point of the system was no reunification, not some white knight savior shit. He’d heard from a panel of foster parents, and though the volunteer coordinators weren’t going to showcase checked-out lightweights like the woman he and Sammy had stayed with, these foster parents were pretty exceptional: taking on sick kids, hurt kids, scared kids, tiny pre me babies, tough teens. He decided he’d revise his opinion of foster parents; for now.

—

Miles Morales was a tough kid; sweet, but tough. Dean couldn’t get any kind of eye contact from him; no way, no how. He’d read in his file about his uncle Aaron passing under confusing circumstances, about him trying to stay with his Mom Rio, but then she’d reported a broken pipe to her landlord, and he’d called CPS, they’d seen the pipes and the color of her skin, and here Miles was, placed in Nowhere, New York.

Dean kept trying; brought him a different kind of coffee every time (with the smart-and-with-it foster mom Cristal’s permission); sat in a creaky chair beside her big grandfather clock and massive chandelier and tried to have conversations while Miles ignored him; drove two towns over to get new ones when he ran out of old ones. Miles drank all of them, not seeming to care one way or another. Dean kept at it. Week after week after week.

He caught parts of the kids’s story, stuff no one had thought to put into his case file. He liked science, robots in particular. He liked sewing, the old discipline of it, the quiet work with the light, maybe something about who he learned it from, Dean didn’t know. He liked Jidenna and Don Omar and Tego Calderón, liked listening with his big headphones and sleeping late. He was a normal teenager and if he showed no interest in CCR or Blue Oyster Cult or Lyndard Skynard, well, Dean survived Sammy’s classical-music-ilicious teenhood.

Dean’s court reports were pretty bare: 

“I met with him 10 hours this month, mostly watched him play video games. He always waves when arrive and when I leave though, it’s kind of sweet, so I think he’s warming up to me. He wants to go back and live with his Mom in New York City; pissed that there weren’t any placements available in the city, even though he knows getting placed out here is more common. He’s doing ok in school but not joining any clubs, not really trying to connect here. His foster Mom took away his phone when he cut school, but I think he traded something, nothing illegal, maybe computer help? With someone at school to get a phone without a data plan, soif he’s on Wifi, he can reach out to his friends back home, Ganke Lee is his best friend. They’re staying in touch with him while he’s here, which is great. I think when he’s allowed back home, he’ll reintegrate really well.”

Three months in, something cracked. It wasn’t a birthday — that wasn’t for a few months. It wasn’t any anniversary that was in his file — his uncle’s death, his being taken from his Mom. But out of the blue, in the middle of kicking his butt at Mario Golf, he asked Dean:

“Did you like it, foster care?”  


And Dean paused, wondering when he’d told him he'd been in the system. He might have done it, but he really thought of it as one weird month in a long line of weird childhood experiences, more normal than getting strung up by a chupacabra in the desert north of El Paso, weirder than learning to shoot from his Dad.

“I didn’t,” he said, “I wanted to be back with my Dad. But there was a guy, a CASA, who helped me out, gave me some good advice, made it bearable.” Dean’s AC/DC ringtone began to blare from his pocket, which always made Miles grimace; Dean startled and checked the caller-ID: it was Sammy. He texted him: 

“I’m meeting with Miles, chat this evening?”

“Yeppers.” Sammy texted back.

Dean leaned back, the rough upholstery of the foster Mom’s easy chair creaking against his leather jacket. This is usually how they spent their visits; no eye-contact, lots of screentime. Dean didn’t mind, he was just getting to making par on most of the courses. Not Sparkling Waters though; fuck Sparkling Waters.

“What was your CASA like?” Miles asked, looked at the TV.

“He was a good guy; a vet, I think. Though the timing never made sense, he looked too young for Vietnam, mid-30s, maybe; I don’t know, I was 8. He seemed to know something about loss and danger and protecting people, and — ” Dean realized he'd said too much, and continued in a calmer tone, “And I think he was willing to share some of that with two scared, pissy brats who dropped into his life for a month.” He adjusted his grip on the white controller. “I’ve wondered sometimes, where he is.”  
  
Miles’s face lit up in the first smile Dean had seen since meeting him.

“Have you tried Facebook?” He said, digging in his bag for his laptop.  
  
“Have I tried what now?” Dean said, playing the old man card for all it was worth as he scrambled to figure out from inside his own brain why he hadn't thought of Facebook.

Miles scoffed: “Don’t gave me that, I've seen you catching Pokemon when you think I’m not looking. What was his name?”  
  
A slight smile on his face as he saw Miles’s fingers poised, ready to fill-in the search bar. “James Buchannan Barnes.” Dean said, name coming easily to him, even after all these years.

Miles’ fingers froze: he raise his eyes slowly, filling with growing horror. Dean froze as well, then watched as Miles flipped open a new tab, got to Google News, and typed: “Winter Soldier.”

The page filled with headlines, and Dean leaned in, staring:

“This, James Buchannan Barnes?”  
  
Dean recognized the face, even though it was a bit of a blurry photograph, something like a security camera scrape might produce.

“Yeah,” Dean said, trying to read the headlines as fast as he could. Something-something DC, something-something Hydra — _oh shit_ Dean thought.  
  
“Ah,” Miles said, and looked shifty, fingers fiddling on the keyboard. “Ah, how open to you are to having your childhood memories ruined?”  
  
“What?” Dean asked. “You think Bucky’s the —“  
  
Miles held up a finger, then tapped something else into his laptop, turning the screen away from Dean. “Ok, just so we’re super clear before doing this, other than Bucky being a pretty chill dude in the ‘80s, do you remember anything specific about him, anything, strange?”

And Dean said, though he hadn’t thought about it in years, said:

“Yeah, he had a prosthetic, one made entirely out of metal. The, uh, the fingers moved perfectly. It was like a flesh hand, like something you would see in sci fi today, still not available for most amputees. I figured it had been some kind of military experiment, science experiment on returning vets,” and he looked guiltily at Miles, who’d described himself as a science experiment on no few number of occasions, though Dean hadn’t figured out why yet, “I mean, like he was an early tester.”  


“‘Science experiment' might have been more accurate,” Miles said, muttering as he continued to tap on his computer. Then he stopped. A video sounded, something like whirring air, something like steel closing with a clang, and he managed to get the video paused.

“Will you promise not to be mad?” he asked, and Dean nodded, as he turned the laptop around.Miles hit play and Dean watched as Bucky Barnes fought Captain American in their nation’s capital. Then in Europe. Then somewhere else. It was awful, his face dead like he was possessed.

Dean stopped the video before it returned to the anchors breathlessly recounting his crimes. Miles body was incredibly tense, his head all the way down. There was nothing in his file about him being hurt physically at home, it seemed more like a problem that he was removed than that anything bad was happening to him but his entire posture spoke about the avoidance of pain as a way of living.

Dean kept his voice even: “I’m not mad, Miles. Thank you for showing me.” Miles peeked up his eyes, just a little, under his furrowed brows.

“So, you like, knew the Winter Soldier?”

Dean leaned back, thinking through what he’d just seen and what he wanted to share with Miles right now. 

“I was in care, like you, and I hated it, like you. I think it was a much better fit for me than it is for you, being real for a moment, but at the time, there was nothing anyone could have said to me to convince me my place wasn’t helping my Dad.”

  
Dean huffed a little, thinking of how Sammy would feel, hearing him say it like that. 

“That’s the problem; if you hear someone saying they can’t help themselves because they’re too wrapped up helping someone else, the word for that isn’t loyalty, it’s codependency.” _Or obsession_ he thought to himself, thinking of a certain angel. He pushed Cas from his mind, trying to get to a place of quiet and contemplation. He had never really gotten there, bit it didn't stop him from trying.

“Bucky was my CASA and he was good, He had the arm, but he wasn’t, he wasn’t hurting people. And I’d seen people hurt; I knew what to look for in predators”— eyes held too long, too quiet, too silent, too silky too kind , too tough, too too too too _too close_ — “and Bucky wasn’t a predator.”

He paused, thinking about his next words. “I think maybe they must have taken something from him, some iota of self control, some piece of the puzzle of his humanity. I think maybe he was brainwashed and they called their chips in, what with all the superheroes being back in the world and all.”

Miles choked on something ,and strained to swallow it down. He was quiet for a moment but Dean thought he was thinking and decided to give him the room.

Then he said. “If I did something, not something bad, but maybe illegal, would you have to tell anyone?”  


Dean was so glad for his training in that moment, because he could answer, completely confidently: “If it’s about hurting a child, or hurting yourself, I probably would. Anything else, I’m not a cop and I’m not a photocopy machine.”

Miles didn’t flicker a smile and Dean got serious. He leaned forward, turning down the game’s background music. Mile said:  
  
“I’m a superhero.”

Dean froze, smothering the laugh hanging in his throat. When he was under control, he nodded to Miles to keep going. 

“I got bit by a radioactive spider and then some crazy stuff happened with my uncle and I was sneaking out to save people from like petty thieves and stuff.” His smile faded for a moment before snapping back. 

“I can get around pretty good in places like this, with a lot of trees, but Dean, you should see me in the city. I can swing entire city blocks.” Then he began to type frantically on his laptop, hunching over the screen. 

“I’ll show you.”

And there was Spider-Man web spraying between his fingers, clearly having a blast while he helped someone get their stolen bike back. The costumed kid waved to the bike’s owner before swinging away and Dean grinned — he knew that wave, it was just like Miles’. Miles returned the smile, face opening up as he saw approval.

“Are you an Avenger?” Dean asked, and Miles’ face fell.

“Tony Stark gave me an internship, sort of like prep to become an Avenger? But I lost it when I went into foster care.”

  
“He took your internship away?” Dean asked, already all ready to Mama bear the shit out of this problem.

Miles was shaking his head, too embarrassed to raise his eyes. Dean glanced up at the chandelier, giving the kid some space without moving away.

“When I got moved, I texted him, tried to get his help, but; bupkiss.” Miles’s eyes were wide, face tense. “I _tried_ and _tried_ , Dean. I never had anyone else’s phone, Tony would always tell me where to show up, when to leave, and he never even texted me back, not even when I got stuffed out here.” 

Miles’s breathing hitched, and he leaned to the side, clutching his stomach, gasping, “He didn’t even _care_ Dean; we were just too small a problem for him, too dark-skinned. And I was embarrassed, I felt so low, he treated me like I was something, some _one_ special and then just dropped me when I got complicated.”

Then his face was in his arms, and his shoulders were shaking. Dean had cried like that, and seen Samy cry like that even more times, so he leaned over, put a hand on the kid’s shoulder, and just kept the contact. Between the silent sobs, he could hear a voice, sounding much younger than Miles usually managed to play, saying how much he missed his Mom and he missed New York and he couldn’t wait to get back and he didn't hate Dean he just wanted to be gone and there wasn’t anything Dean could do to help with that he knew but he wanted to be sure Dean knew he was loyal to his Mom and that Dean knew that he hated it here and wanted to be gone _now_. Dean just kept the contact and rode it out with him as the grandfather clock ticked down on the wall.

—

“Siri, give me something sad.” Dean asked as soon as he got in his car, and Siri started him on some of the loudest, ugliest death metal tracks he won’t sure he’d ever bought. Something that was all lungs and howling, no kin of rhythm. 

It was exactly right. 

“You’re a creepy little pocket robot, Siri.”

“Probably.” She replied in a Scottish accent.

—

The next few meetings with Miles markedly less dramatic. Dean kept them to a scheduled trip to a local museum, where they learned about the early lumber trade in excruciating detail and Miles enjoyed making acid comments about who and what were left out of every photograph. Dean enjoyed his sense of the absurd even while wondering how much of history he’d missed in his own short academic career by not asking who’d been asked to leave any given picture before it had been taken.

On the trip back, Miles let him know he’d been thinking about joining a club at school, something with computers. They hadn’t talked about Bucky since that first day, and Miles seemed worried about that conversation and Dean didn’t know what he wanted, so he didn’t bring it up. He wasn't planning on staying — and privately, Dean didn’t think he should need to — but he was also getting bored coming home at 3:30pm getting his homework done by 4:30 and just vegetating in front of the TV.

One of the things Dean had learned about in his CASA training was that there were words for that kind of vegetating, that dealing with trauma takes effort, it takes energy that can’t be used other places. If someone in the middle of something really tough, they will be slower to deal with other stuff in their lives, not as bright and sparky as they usually are. They might not handle problems well or quickly or even to care for themselves because they were using a fuckton of energy — that’s a formal, therapeutic term, a fuckton of energy — survive whatever it was that happened to them. 

Now, Dean had always thought of himself as trauma teflon, but the more he read about it and heard about it, the more he could see when in his life he’d taken time to recover from the shitstorm of his adolescence — and what had happened to him when he hadn’t taken that time. Spoiler alert: nothing good. Dean could see that Miles was starting to come out of that hibernation faze and Dean knew he would need more to occupy himself as he got more and more of his brain back. So he planned a gift a surprise.

Dean drove Miles back to Christal’s house, a little early so they had some time, and pulled into her driveway to park. He jumped out of the car and ran around the back to get something out of its weirdly-springy trunk of the 1992 Skyline he’d fixed up. He’d cleared out all of his weapons, just for this surprise. The present was heavy and in a beaten-up grocery bag, stapled together at the top:  
  
“It’s for you,” he said, thrusting it into Miles’ arms. Miles staggered a bit under the weight, and quickly set it on the ground. He glanced up at Dean, who gestured to it and Miles ripped open the staples. Then his eyes widened and he reached into the bag to pull out —

“ _A Wrinkle in Time_?” He asked. “I love this one, but, I have a copy back —“

And then his face fell and he gripped the book a little more tightly. Dean nodded, gesturing again to the bag:  
  
“I figured you might be missing your books. You have a great used-books store downtown, and you can trade that bag in for another bag as soon as you’re done, if there’s ones you don’t want to keep around.

“Thank you,” Miles said, voice small, as he riffled through the bag with his left hand, right still clutching the Le Guin book. Anne McCaffrey’s _Killashandra_ books, Robin McKinley’s feminist fairytale retellings, Terry Pratchett, Garth Nix — most had been recommendations of the cute bookseller whose hair had been bright purple where it wasn’t shaved completely off, but she’d started off with Le Guin so he figured she had good taste.

Miles headed inside, knocking on the door since Christal hadn’t gotten around to getting him a key yet, if she ever planned to, and waving to Dean before he went inside.

—

Dean leaned back in the hospital visiting chair and said, voice low and sure:

“Go, Fish.”

Castiel smirked at him over his own cards, hands shaking just a little but for the first time in a while, his eyes were clear. Dean knew it couldn’t be the drug cocktail the doctors seemed to think he needed, since it had no impact on his angelic self, but maybe Castiel had his own hibernation schedule, his own time he needed to regrow around the scar tissue.

“Do you have any, fives?” Dean asked, and Castiel scowled, pulling his singleton out of his hand and flopping it on the table in front of Dean. Then he smiled, saying:

“Give me your twos,” and Dean winced. Cas had asked for that one a few minutes ago. Dean hadn’t had it then, and hadn’t drawn since then. It wasn’t comfortable, witnessing his brilliant, ornery, difficult, wonderful friend sitting trapped behind not necessarily he best decision-making skills left on this planet of theirs.

Dean shook his head and Castiel huffed, setting down his cards.

Dean pulled out his phone, and looked to see if he’d saved anything funny to show Castiel. He opened up YouTube and the Winter Solider video he’d been searching for a few days ago started auto playing, all terrified screams and crashing metal as the man who’d been Bucky Barnes tossed soldiers around like puppets he didn’t particularly like.

He was trying to silence it, when he realized Castiel had leaned way over the bed and was owl-facing at the screen. Dean shrugged and tipped it towards him, letting the video finish.

It was shaky, taken by a bystander, and cut-out as soon as Bucky got dive-bombed by that flying eagle guy — Falcon, Miles had said his name was Falcon and Dean should try to remember people’s names. 

“Dean,” Castiel said, and that word, just that word got to his guts in a way that was hard to explain. It wasn’t, not really, if he actually looked himself in the face, but he’d buried this longer than most things in his life, and Cas was in no position to care about Dean’s pantsfeelings. Dean just had to hustle on. Cas continued:

“That man looks brainwashed,” Cas said, a finger pressing into the glass of the phone, leaving a big smudge.

“He probably is, Cas,” Dean replied, and his voice sounded more wary, more sad, than it should have for a random guy on YouTube.

“Do you know him?” And Dean thought of blowing him off, pretending he thought Cas didn’t understand how YouTube worked. But then he realized, he didn’t want to be that asshole today.

“Yeah, Cas, I did. Back in the ‘80s, there were a few weeks when I lived in foster care situation while my Dad was in lock-up. He was assigned to be Sammy’s CASA but he kept an eye out for me too; I don’t know what happened to him, all the official timelines make it sound like he was working for some Nazi-Soviety bastard child from 1942 to now, but what Soviet shit would he have been pulling in North Dakota?” Dean shook his head, “I don’t even know Cas.”  
  
“Maybe you should ask him?”

Dean balked, remembering Miles asking the same question.   
  
“I don’t think he’d remember me; if he doesn’t know who Captain America is, when they were some kind of best-buddies during the war, I don’t think he’d remember a little kid.”

Castiel hummed and then considered: “When they wiped my memories, they only know to wipe what they thought they knew I knew. But little things, small things, things I could hide from them, I got to keep. Maybe he kept you.”

Dean paused and felt something change inside. He distracted Castiel with videos of a men exploding watermelons with high-powered rifles until the nurses kicked him out, but even as he thought he knew better, he knew he would do it, would follow-up, would send a letter would do what it took to figure out what had happened to the man who used to be his friend.

—

There were just a few ways that Dean could get in contact with Bucky, if he was even still alive (not entirely clear from the media coverage of what happened in Wakanda). He started with the easiest: a message to the Avengers Facebook Page.

He drafted it in his head for a week before he finally pulled over the to side of the road, blocks away from his apartment, and typed it out on his phone.

“My name is Dean Winchester. When I was a little kid in foster care, I had a Court Appointed Special Advocate named Bucky Barnes in ND. I don’t know if he’d remember me, but I wanted to tell him I’m ok, I’m a CASA now for a young man, and if he’d like, I’d want to get Bucky a beer sometime and hear how things are going for him. He meant a lot to me, taught me a lot, cared about me as a person when everyone else in my life either needed me as a parent or used me as a tool for their missions. Anyway, thanks for reading this, Avengers Intern. 

\- Dean Michael Winchester.

Dean hit send and closed the app before he could think better of it. He started the car up as he felt a message come in, but decided to ignore it until he got home.

He got about half-a-block before he pulled out his phone to check:

The Facebook message came in and just said: “Your message has been received, you will receive a response if appropriate.”

Then, 2 minutes later, as he was on the stairs, struggling to get his keys out: “Please call 212-555-6820.”

No name, no signature, just: “Please call 212-555-6820.”

Dean leaned back and wondered. Then he decided _fuck it_ and pressed the number as he swung inside his one-bedroom. A voice, even-toned like a robot but more alive than any he'd expected answered and said:

“This is Vision, how may I direct your call?”

“Hi, uh, Vision,” Dean said, purple tights and a big red cape flying up before his eyes, from footage of the Sokovia disaster, “I got a Facebook—“

“Ah, Mr Winchester. Yes. Sergeant Barnes is interested in seeing you. How does this Saturday, at 2pm sound?” Dean’s eyes were wide as he pulled the phone away from his ear, stared at it, and put it back again. He sat down, back to the bookcase he was slowly-but-surely filling up with broke-spined classics of science fiction.

“Uh, I guess that’s fine,” Dean said, and then smacked himself in the face, “Actually, and I think Bucky would understand, but I’m seeing my CASA youth, Miles, that afternoon at 2pm. Could he do earlier or later; maybe at the Lazy Suzan diner over on 4th?”  


There was an amused hum from the man-thing on the other side of the phone and then the reply: “Mr Barnes will now arrive at 6pm at your current location. Would this ‘Miles’ be Miles Morales?”  
  
Dean was quiet for a second, then said: “I can't share information about my Court Appointed Special Advocate’s case, but I would love to see Bucky at 6pm at my place. Thank you, Vision.”

“You’re welcome, Dean,” the robot-ish voice replied and then the line went silent.

Dean texted Sam: “I’m going to see Bucky this weekend.” Then he cracked open a beer and waited for the exclamation points to roll in.

—

Saturday came too soon and not soon enough. Dean knew that he could just keep focused on his job, his books, but he kept thinking about those few meetings he’d had with Bucky when he was a child, the things he’d kept from them in his heart, mostly quiet, mostly not shared with anyone, not even Sammy.

He finally got his head focused and ready to go just in time for him to knock on the door of Miles’s foster home and hear a CRASH.

He paused, waiting for some kind of “I’m alright I’m alright,” and after waiting what felt like a eon, he heard — nothing of the kind.

“Miles?” Dean yelled through the door, voice harsher than he intended. 

“I think I need some help,” Miles’s voice came through the door, weakly. Dean didn’t know if the door was unlocked or locked, but he knew it was open after he put his shoulder through it on his way into the living room. There, in a piled of broken chandelier and spider webs, lay Miles, holding himself still to avoid cutting himself any more than he already had on the shattered glass.

Miles grinned up at him, half embarrassed, half covering it, and half knowing how much of a dummy he looked, laying there surrounded by plaster-chunks as more white dust floated down from the ceiling.

“You tried to web inside?” Dean asked, voice barely holding his amusement in.

“I tried to web inside.” Miles confirmed, voice showing a mix of shame and rebellion.

“Where’s your foster mom?” Dean asked, trying to sound stern.

Miles shrugged and winced. Dean moved further into the room.

“Where’s the broom?” Miles indicated with his chin and Dean got it out, setting some paper towels and getting to work, snagging a small trash can from the nearest bathroom and dumping in the biggest pieces. He start humming “Simple Man” while he was doing it, and Miles said:  
  
“I didn’t know you sang; are you happy about something?”  
  
And Dean paused, not sure what to say. He didn’t want to overshare himself, didn’t want to put his stuff on Miles’s back. But he also was happy,and wanted to let him see that there were good emotions in the world too, things to be happy about. He started very carefully:

“I’m getting dinner with an old friend,” he said, as he cleaned up the glass around him, drifts of plaster dust moving with each push and tug of the broom. He dumped his current pile of dust and scraps of plaster into the trashcan, getting back to work.

“You heard back from Bucky?” Miles crowed, and Dean sighed internally. He needed to get out of this shitty habit of underestimating the kid. 

“So, what’re you going to say to him?” Miles asked, and a whole host of anxieties rained down on Dean’s neck and shoulders. He tried to sort through them trying to use a calm voice like he’d learned in training, even when it was the opposite of cam inside his own head.

“I was thinking of saying that he’d been a good CASA and telling him a bit about you, if that's ok?” And Miles face got a little quiet. Then he said:  
  
“Could you not, talk about me?” And Dean felt like he’d been hit in the face with a bucket of half-melted ice-cubs, maybe with them stone-cold bullets thrown in for funsies as well.

“Of course, no problem. I’ll just mention I have a smart, clever advocate youth. I won’t let him know anything about who you are or where you're from.”

“Thanks,” Miles said, looking relieved. Dean was of course a fount of curiosity, but he was also just getting into the stage of having actual conversations with Miles about life and didn’t want to mess that up. So he kept sweeping; Miles had enough room to sit-up now, brushing some of the plaster out of his hair. Dean would have to see if there was a proper barber shop in this town, if Miles wanted his edges cleaned up; it wasn’t something Christal would think about, probably.

Then Miles asked, voice wistful: “Do you think Captain America will come with him?”

And Dean froze a second time, totally befuddled. He hadn't even thought about Captain Rogers. He, well, he would have loved to meet him, even before all this craziness with the Accords. But now he was an American symbol and a rebel against the established order? That was so punk rock Dean couldn't even handle it.

“I don’t know, Miles. What would you ask him, if he did?” And Miles adjusted his position on the floor and thought for a moment, before saying:  
  
“I’d ask him what he thinks of white supremacists cosplaying as him at Nazi rallies.”

Dean paused for a second, then said:  
  
“That’s a good question.” Miles nodded, speaking fast and faster:

“Being real, I think he’ll say he’d punch Richard Spencer and David Duke in the face as often as he did Hitler in all of those vaudeville shows he acted in to raise money for the troops in WWII. He knows that racism is stupid and something to be unlearned and makes you miss the obvious fact that potential is evenly distributed but opportunity is not. What, some immigrant kid from Brooklyn living in a queer neighborhood would be down with those khaki-wearing off-brand white-out markers? And I’d want him to say something about how the first amendment protects against censorship, not consequences —“

“Hold up,” Dean said, stopping sweeping and raising a hand, “He lived in a what neighborhood?”

Miles kept going: “Yeah, I read this whole book about it, _The Gay Metropolis_ , I looked up his neighborhood in Brooklyn and it was the queer neighborhood. Most people think he and Bucky were a couple, but you know, on the DL.” And then he paused, looking at Dean carefully:  
  
“Bucky was into guys?” Dean said, trying to get his bearings, knowing he was sounding like an asshole, head entirely full of Cas’s floppy black hair and how his sometimes vacant face reminded him of Bucky’s and what they’d both lost and all of those horrible images he been stalking these past few days, both on his computer screen, pictures sliding, rearranging, memories shifting and spinning and cross-referencing and organizing themselves across his brain.

When he tuned back in, Dean realized Miles silent, looking at the floor, crumbling a piece of plaster between his fingers. That was a silence Dean knew too, the silence of having said too much. Dean didn’t know how to save the conversation, to reestablish his woke credentials, to explain that he was just an insecure asshole with his own adult problems. He had to try:

“I like guys, it would make sense if someone as cool as Bucky Barnes did too.” And he could not have sounded more uncool, could not have sounded less sure of himself, could not have made it sound more like he was trying to read form an awkward coming out script and at the same time, realized this was the first time he’d come out and wishing hope against hope he’d actually paid attention during the LGBTQ training they’d gotten as CASAs to know the actual right words.

But Miles unfroze, covering by saying: “Cool, I’m into ladies, but what I was going to say before you go all no homo/yo homo about it with him, he probably knows there’s a whole queer theory readings of the old Captain America comics and won’t be surprised.”

Dean coughed, and then coughed again and stood, sweeping open the curtains and opening the big bay windows to the street to let some of the dust out. Over his shoulder he said:

“I think that’s good enough to get you out of this mess. So, where’s your foster mom again?”

He didn’t see the glint from the rooftop across the street.

—

Joshua Smyth, newly-graduated Hydra agent, was confused. He was where he was supposed to be — where the intelligence said Spider-Man was living now. He was looking through his telescope into a middle class home, someplace he’d seen the target go into. But something was wrong. Not an agent known for making independent calls, he texted his handler:

“Boss, are you sure this is the right place?”

“y” Came the reply.

He waited another minute. The target was still inside, but he couldn’t possibly be Spider-Man. There was no way.

“Calling you now,”

He took a picture with his phone and dialed his handler’s number, adjusting his special new Hydra jacket as he did so. His supervisor picked up on the first ring, with a pissed-off sounding: “Hello, Smyth.”

“Boss, I don’t think this is the right mark,” 

“You’re not paid to think.” _Moron_ , thought his supervisor. _That dumb n00b is just poleaxed Spider-Man was black; well, everyone at Hydra had been shocked at the non-Aryan nature of the spiderkid, but that just went to show._

“But boss — look, I’m texting you his picture now.”

And Smyth sent the picture, of the black boy and Spider-Man, who looked way too old. He hoped his boss would just see it and tell him what was up.

“That’s Spider-Man, right there. I expect him tranqued and on my desk by sundown.”

“But boss, he’s—“

“It’s a sign of the degeneracy of the so-called Avengers, letting an unfit specimen like him hold so much power. You’ll be doing all right-thinking people a favor by taking him off the streets.”

Agent Smyth nodded, thinking it was probably a good idea to get such an old superhero out of the way before he hurt himself or someone else. He began working his way down the side of the house, blowdart clenched between his teeth. He watched the too-mature Spider-Man get into his frankly awesome car, and head out. Agent Smyth tailed at a distance.

—

Dean woke up, drowsy, confused, and in pain. He was surrounded by metal walls, on a metal cot, but nothing in his mouth was telling him he’d gotten thrown in the drunk tank for not-the-first-time. He remembered Miles frantically for a moment — was he here too?

But then he remembered saying goodby to him, the kid letting him know he would be fine and Dean should, “ _Get out of my hair already, jeez, and go meet your childhood role model at that greasy spoon.”_

He breathed a sigh of relief, an act made more difficult by the straight jacket he only now realized he was encased in. It was black, tactical, and tight. He tried to think of who he’d pissed off recently, and got nothing. He rolled to his back, feeling his phone in his pocket, and tried to think past the pain in his shoulders, figure out a way to get out.

—

“You have to get Dean out!” Miles shouted at Tony Stark, teen standing on the massive board room conference table, surrounded by the seated Avengers, a hundred stories above Manhattan at dawn, glaring down at the t-shirted billionaire’s slightly confused goatee.

“If Bucky couldn’t stop the kidnapping-in-action, what makes you think _I_ can help, kid?” Tony drawled, as Bucky blanched and looked down at his hands.

Bucky had seen Dean taken from the parking lot of the innocuous diner where he’d been watching his coffee get cold while he waited for him, fiddling with his black gloves. He tried, he had, but when the kidnapper had started waving his piece around, Bucky had backed off, not wanting to endanger the crowded street. He hadn’t thought to pack his tactical gear, his trackers, his spiderbites, his guns; this was supposed to be a trip down memory lane, not a combat opp. He’d shouted at Vision to retrace Dean’s tracks and had found Miles in a slightly-destroyed living room, doing his homework. 

Bucky had wanted to keep this from him, but if Miles was who Vision said he was, then he would want to be brought in. He convinced Miles to get the vast resources of the Avengers behind them before going on the war path, and the teen had been viciously reluctant but had given in. He’d raged for about 30 minutes about his incompetence in the back of Bucky’s rental then passed out from the stress for the remaining 3 hours. He had woken up in a righteous rage.

“You _have_ to.” Miles said, sticking his finger in Tony’s face. Tony leaned back and Bucky nearly whistled. It had been a long time since Howard, but he hadn’t expected any kind of patience in the face of even a justified temper tantrum.

“Look, whoever took this muggle —” Tony began, but Bucky broke in:

“I think Dean was taken by Hydra.” The room silenced and the temperature fell.

“What made you think that?” Steve asked, leaning forward. He’d been quiet until now, accepting Bucky’s terse texts: 

“My CASA kid was kidnapped,” 

and “he’s an adult,” 

and “I’m coming home and bringing Spidy-kid.”

And “Tony fucked up _hard_ with this kid; no more managing internship programs for him, mmkay?”

Steve continued — “Maybe it was someone else from his past, he know he has a lot of aliases and way more connections to the supernatural than most random 39 year old volunteer mentors.”

Bucky replied, voice full of sarcasm: “Well, the Hydra logo on his jacket for one, and the black kidnapper van he was driving.”

“Why would they want Dean?” Miles asked, still standing on the table, sounding afraid. Steve had Mae Tony keep him out of any of the big actions against Hydra, but he’d seen enough on the news to know Hydra was serious business.

Bucky was shaking his head: “I don’t know, kid. But we have a map of all of their current bases, thanks to Widow’s worms,” nodding to Natasha. She smiled with grim good humor.

"And what's your connection to this, what's his name, Smith&Wesson? Why is this Avengers business again?” Tony asked, shifting his attention to Bucky. Bucky would admire his ability to focus even as Miles glared seven hells of anger down on him; would admire him for it, if Tony hadn’t been a complete asshole in this situation.

Bucky corrected, "Winchester, Dean Winchester and his brother Sammy -- Sam." He shook his head, trying to focus. All he could see was Dean Winchester's fierce little face on that front porch, baring the doorway until Bucky proved himself worthy.

He closed his eyes, focusing on the mission and the moment: 

“My connection, uh: back inthe 80s, I got away from Hydra for a year or so. They might have thought it was deep cover -- there was a lot of confusion, competition between branches, not a lot of focus on what the ground troops were doing. But I remember waking up in an apartment in Michigan, target briefings for a local politician in my head, a cover as a union electrician with transfer papers from a shop in Brooklyn -- I think I never really lost my accent, at least when I was on US soil -- but for the first time,I didn't have overwhelming imperative to follow orders.”

“So I moved a few towns over, got a job working on houses with my transfer papers, and started over. After a month or so of hanging out at the union hall between jobs, shooting the shit, a young woman came in to give a presentation, collecting volunteers to work with foster youth between gigs; flexible hours, lots of chances to help, you picked the kid you worked with. The system had changed a lot from when Stevie and I were coming up, in both good and bad ways, and these volunteers -- CASAs, court appointed special advocates -- sort of tried to smooth over the gaps in the system. I had some free time since it was winter by then and there wasn't a ton of house-work in the wet season, so I did the training and got matched with Sammy."

Bucky rubbed his flesh hand over his face, feeling the long-held callouses catch and drag on his skin. "Their Dad was a piece of work, expecting Dean to parent when he was barely out of elementary school while he went off on some kind of monster hunts." Tony's eyes widened at this, but before he could ask what kind of monsters, Bucky pushed on. 

"So I went and met-up with Sammy. After seeing how much the boys needed each other's support, I asked to be assigned to both of them. I met with them about once a week for a month or so, then their Dad made bail and they skipped down."

He looked down, flexing his metal hand: "That was before cellphones, email, we weren't supposed to give our home addresses to the kids. I'd thought of looking them up online when I got myself back, after Wakonda, but figured they would have changed their names so many times as to not make it worth it. Then, I guess Dean finally decided to skip out on his Dad's lifeplan and try being a muggle for a while, and then decided to be a CASA also, and he got matched with Miles," Bucky finished, gesturing to Miles, who had sunk to a tailor seat, shoulders miserable.

Bucky stood from his chair and climbed onto the table, the sturdy built slab of mahogany groaning under their combined weights. He sat beside Miles, not inside his personal space, but close enough to be a bulwark against the stares of the other Avengers sitting in chairs.

Miles cleared his throat, saying, "I guess that's where I come in. After Tony wouldn't return by calls about Mom being sick--" Tony made an outraged sound, but Bucky stared at him, glaring until he simmered down so Miles could finish, "I got sent into foster care upstate." 

The room, which had already been pretty tense from the mention of Hydra, congealed at this, Pepper Potts stepping away from the table and gesturing angrily at one of her assistants.

"And it was, ok I guess. I missed Mom, I missed my special tech classes, and my foster mom was kind of a bore, but still," he glanced sideways at Bucky, "Dean didn't make it half-bad. I told him about the whole superhero thing.”

"My court date is next week and the state-appointed lawyer," now Pepper was dictating something that sounded like _Stark Lawyers_ and _Tony is taken off of all HR forever, got it?_ and _Get Rio whatever she needs_. Miles continued, looking a little hopeful though no-less pissed, 

"The state-appointed lawyer thinks I have a good chance of getting to go back to her, so I'm trying to keep up with my actual school's work so I don't miss too much, though I've probably lost-out on the Presidency for the robotics club, since I missed the first half of tournaments for the year," he said, voice dull with exhaustion. Hearing its species name, one of Tony’s robots suction-cupping its way across the floor-to-ceiling windows, either looking for robotic fun or for some unknown, probably deeply paranoid security-ish reason, turned its camera towards him. The early-morning light glinted off its glass-and-metal carapace. Miles quirked a little mile and shot off a bit of web, leaving the robot to try and untangle its feelers without falling off the window.

"Anyway, after a month or so, I asked Dean why he was volunteering, and he said he'd had a CASA named Bucky Barnes, and, well, I knew about you from Tony," and he glanced over at Bucky, leaning a bit towards him, the first affectionate motion he'd made since getting into the room. 

Miles continued: ”I told him he'd been mentored by the Winter Soldier and he didn't know what that meant,"Bucky choked. "So, yeah, I told him to reach out."

Tony said, in what he probably thought was a reasonable tone of voice, sympathetic even, though it made Miles’s hackles rise almost visibly: "Why didn't you just text me, Miles? When you found out Dean knew Bucky? I assumed you would be safe out there, it would be better for you — ”

Miles exploded: “Better for me without my _Mom_? That’s such patronizing bullshit. First, you ignored all of my texts! You'd ignored me when I needed real, actual-life help, not when I was a convenient pet, not when I was a project you could show off, but when I needed real, adult, responsible help, and so when something came up that was lighter, well, you'd failed at the heavy stuff, why could you help." and then he said, almost too quiet to hear, but clear enough: 

"And I didn't want to find out the only reason you were helping Dean was because he's white and Bucky's white and you know how to act around white people but not people like me and Mom."

The room was arctic, but Bucky shifted a little closer to Miles and that seemed to give him some strength. Tony was struck into silence and Steve stood:  
  
“Tony, you did a shit job with Miles. We’re going to have a conversation about your ‘internshi[p’ model; one you will not fucking enjoy.” Everyone winced, because while Cap wasn’t a fan of ‘language’ on comms during a fight, when he used it, he fucking meant it.

“It sounds like we owe Dean a debt that can’t be paid without blood; preferably, Hydra blood. He picked up where we failed to support you, Miles. Pepper will make sure you go back to your Mom tonight, no matter what.” Pepper nodded.

Steve leaned over the table, big hands firmly planted and face stern. “We’ll save Dean; whether they kidnapped him for leverage against you or against Bucky,” And if Miles hadn’t been sitting so close to Bucky on the table, he never would have noticed, but Bucky shivered once, hard at that thought. Miles wondered if Bucky would even be still siting there if it wasn’t for him, rather than standing or pacing or however he got the shakes out; Miles thought maybe he was trying to hold strong for Miles, sort of like he was his grand-CASA. Miles leaned a little closer to him.

“Ok, first step,” Said Steve, “How are we going to find him?”

Miles said: “Dean might still have his phone?” Vision made a shushing motion, then paused.

“Sir,” he started, then coughed, “Correction, Tony; I’m scanning the networks to see if his phone has been active since yesterday afternoon.”

Vision’s face went dull and Miles thought it looked something like a baby concentrating on pooping. A moment later, Vision said: 

“Sir, it appears Mr Morales is correct; Mr Winchester kept his phone with him, somehow, and we can use it to get his exact location.” 

“Sooo,” Tony said, drawing it out. “Probably a trap?” Bucky shrugged, standing up only to jump down to the ground in the gap between Tony and Pepper, gap that was vastly wider than it had been at the beginning of the meeting.

  
“I do not care.” Bucky said. “If there’s people there and they have fucking double Nazi symbols on and they have Dean, then I can kill them no matter their intentions. Who’s coming with me?

Steve walked around to table to stand with him, as did Natasha, and surprisingly, Vision and Widow. Finally Tony rose as well, saying, keeping away from Bucky and Miles and saying:

“I guess this is going to be a whole thing, isn’t it.” 

Steve ignored him.

“Vision’s driving.” He said, as the roar of the quinjet engines warming up filled the air.

—

This hadn’t been Dean’s worst bought of captivity, but it might have been the most boring. Absolutely nothing was happening, and everything he thought he heard someone, they were talking away from him. He as disoriented, confused about the shape of things, and sure how toproceed. He didn’t expect Sammy or anyone to come get him; the kidnapping thing had seemed kind of focused, more professional than most of the hick-fucking-crazies he normally dealt with.

He still had his phone, or at least, he hoped that was the weirdly warm piece of metal next to his thigh. He’d shoved the phone in there in the initial struggle, hoping maybe if someone in his prior life was really looking for him, it would help. Hopefully, it would have enough battery if he needed it. If they left it with him, it probably meant he was bait. _Who had Sammy t-ed off this time_ , he thought. The straight jacket was designed for someone or some _thing_ way stronger than he was, so he didn’t have much he could do but his least favorite activity: waiting.

Then he had an idea:  
  
“Hey, Siri —“

—

The plan was simple: attack. They would come in high and camouflaged; well, some of them would. Others would stay red-white-and blue/gold and spangly while continuing to believe that “subtlety” was just a word critics used to cramp their styles. It took them 2 hours to get going, finding all the weapons they needed. Miles didn’t leave the conference room and Bucky stayed with Miles like a heavily-armed shadow. The robots left and came back in, carrying trays of a buffet breakfast. Miles didn’t get up, but Bucky did, silently piling food onto plates and shoving them at him until he ate. Steve watched with a bit of a smile until Bucky filled up another plate and shoved it at him; Steve ate docilely and Miles stifled a small smile.

The warehouse where they tracked Dean’s phone to was only 15 minutes in the quinjet from Manhatten, near where Miles had been living. Miles had strapped in with confidence he didn’t feel, but then Bucky had quietly sat on one side and Widow on the other, and Widow had spent the flight teaching him knife tricks until he was laughing with surprise and delight. Miles didn’t tell her it was his first ride on a plane.

Bucky was first off, keeping and Miles behind him. As he ran, Miles checked his webs. It looked like the low ceilings wouldn’t do him much good, but he wanted to be ready. They landed safely, no gunshots and no alarm. They entered the building at a run, Tony up-top, Widow around the back, Steve to the side, Bucky and Miles straight through the front door.

Miles covered his nose a few steps into the compound — it stunk like a bunch of men had been living there and hadn’t bothered to figure out how to hook the water up. There was a tang of terror, like a boy’s locker room before weigh-ins. _The men who worked here were scared,_ Miles realized.

The first corner they hit, Miles tried to get ahead of Bucky as they went around a corner. Bucky grabbed a hold of his hoodie, ballingthe material up with her metal hand and nearly lifting Miles off the ground. He pushed him behind him again wand hissed:

“I’m not explaining to Dean how I got his CASA kid got shot. Stay _behind me_.” Miles struggled in Bucky’s grip:

“What if we’re too late? What if something I do,” _Or don’t do_ his jerkbrain added maliciously, “gets Dean hurt?”

Bucky’s face rearrange from his Soldier’s scowl and for an instant, he looked so much younger, and so much older, all at once: “I don’t make promises and I don’t get to make the final decision, none of us do on our side, but anything I can do to save Dean, I will.”

Miles nodded reluctantly then they heard footsteps coming around a corner, Bucky turning as a man with a gun emerged. Bucky was moving towards him but Miles threw a web that yanked the man’s gun from his hands and Bucky took him out with a hard punch to the jaw. Bucky listened for a moment, and turned back to Miles:  
  
“Good job, but you still don’t get to go in front,” and he pulled a gun from behind his back and moved around the corner.

“Fair enough.” Miles muttered.

Bucky and Miles heard gunfire, but it was always on there other side of the compound. After an explosion rocked the compound, Bucky checked on Steve, and whatever he heard made his shoulders come down from around his ears. They kept searching, every office room, with experiments Miles tried to keep from focusing on; there were, pieces of people. The smell must have been

But no Dean. He wasn’t in the offices, he wasn’t in the bathrooms, he wasn’t in the living quarters he wasn’t under the beds (Miles checked and, somewhat more surreptitiously, Bucky did as well.)

Miles was getting ready to pull his curls straighter than even Steve’s hair when he paused, ears picking something up. It sounded like —

“Down,” he said, pointing to the ground. It was some kind of wood, but he could hear something, something like Dean’s AC/DC ringtone.

Bucky looked around, but now he was listing for it, he could hear something.

“Ok,” he said, looking around. He pushed his way into one of the closets, feeling along the wall and — there.

It was door down to a staircase. Maybe a cellar, maybe some kind of crazy root cellar/nuclear shelter. It wasn’t entirely clear, but he didn’t care, because he could hear it now clearly: clashing hairmetal guitars.

—

Bucky made Miles wait upstairs for ‘security reasons’ but mostly because if Dean was dead, he didn’t want that in the kid’s heart. Being real, he didn’t want it in his heart either, but he was the grownup and really, what was one more nightmare? He already kept Steve up half the night with his freakouts, though he was learning to handle them better, it was still rough going. He go out of the staircase and pushed that thought away: _Find Dean_. He focused.

He came around a corner, to a heavily dented metal door, inside was a bare room and there—

“Dean,” he breathed, and there he was, defiant as they day they’d first met. He had some scruff on his chin, some dried blood on the side of his head, but he was struggling, struggling and not making any progress in that straight jacket, but still fighting, _forever fighting._

Bucky shook his head and broke the handle off the door with the butt of his gun. Dean startled when he saw him,then mouthed something. Bucky couldn’t hear him — the music was deafeningly-loud in this tiny metal holding cell.

  
“Siri, shut it down.” Dean said, and suddenly it was silence, except for their breathing.

“Dean,” Bucky said. Dean nodded, cocking his head and smiling.  


“Hey, Bucky,” Dean said. Then he quirked a grin, “Miles send you?”

“Yeah, that’s a heck of an advocate child you pulled. You know he’s special, right?”  


Dean nodded, struggling to his knees, balance wonky, either from the straight jacket or the head wound. Bucky surged forward, catching him under the elbow and turning him as he looked for the locks on the back left of the straight jacket. He avoided why he knew this particular design and snapped the locks, letting the heavy-duty material fall right off of Dean’s arms. He spasmed as his arms came down to rest in a regular position, and Bucky pulled one of them towards him, rubbing feeling back into his forearm as Dean regained his balance.

“Yeah, I knew that before he webbed himself to the chandelier and pulled the ceiling down around his afro.” Dean said.

“Foster homes have chandeliers now?” Bucky asked, voice askance.

“Hey, somethings have to get better. Miles even has his own room.”

“Now that, I don’t doubt,” Bucky said, certain from only a few hours acquaintance Miles would not put up with some random sharing his sleeping space. His next words were so quiet, Dean had to lean closer to hear them:  
  
“Miles is at the top of the stairs, scared witless. I don’t think he should see you here. Can you make it up the stairs?” Dean nodded, and, leaning heavily on Bucky, began the long walk up.

Bucky ushered him up the stairs first, so he could cover them from behind, so when Dean stumbled out of the closet all Bucky heard was:  
  
“Ooof!” Only to emerge to find Dean barely standing with Miles hanging off of him, afro in his face, and a grin on his face.

“Hey, buddy, I’m fine, I’m ok,. Bucky said you were really brave, hey, hey it’s ok.”

Miles nodded, not letting Dean go at all.

“It’s all my fault,” he said. He gestured behind him before winding his grip aback around Dean. “While I was waiting, I saw a file, it had pictures of me, they wanted to,” and his voice cracked but he kept going, “to make an example out of me, something about me ‘being dirty, demeaning heroes everywhere.’”

“Well,” Dean said, making horrified eyes at Bucky over Miles’ head, “They’re ignorant double-Nazi motherfuckers, so I don’t think anything they did is anyone’s fault but theirs. It’s important to remember to put the blame where it belongs, and it belongs with those Hydra asshole.”  
  
Miles pulled away, face panicked: “Are you alright? Did they—?”

Dean shook his head, twice hard,” Nah, I’m fine, kid. You did goodgetting me though, any longer and Siri might have been playing the _Hamilton_ Sammy snuck onto my phone last visit, and not that awesome AC/DC track.”

—

Back on the quinjet, a few remaining Hydra captives bound and gagged in the back cell, Dean strapped in on Miles’ left, while Bucky took the seat on his right. Steve had glanced at him, and walked by, putting a hand on his shoulder that Bucky covered with his own. The way Bucky’s face softened when he looked up at the other man eased something that had been tense in Dean’s chest. Dean turned away and leaned over to Miles and asked: 

“Hey kid,what’d you want to get to eat when we get back?” 

Miles jerked back awake: “Mhuh?” 

“I was thinking Indian, do you like Indian?”

“Murm,” Miles said, nodding, and went back to sleep on Dean’s shoulder. He was moving to take-off his jacket to give the kid a better pillow, stiff arms be damned, when Bucky held up a hand, and reached under their seats, pulling out a full-on silk pillow with little flowers embroidered around the edges.

“Widow’s,” Bucky mouthed, then relented at Dean’s wide eyes. “She helps run a girl scout troop for homeless girls; they made it for her.” He pressed in the middle and the flowers lit up, alternating colors. “It was their soft-circuits project for their computer programming badge.”

Dean smiled and took the pillow, putting it under Miles’s head.

Then Dean leaned back, bringing himself back in line with Bucky, looking at him over Miles’s hair.

“Sorry I missed our meeting,” he said, “I was a little tied up.”

Bucky shot him a smile, and Dean grinned back.

“After we drop off Miles with his Mom, we should get some coffee. If you’re ok with it, I’d like to know more about what you’ve been doing since the ‘80s, today’s craziness notwithstanding.”

Dean’s grin turned wry, and he shook his head. “Today was nothing compared with my usual.”

Bucky’s eyes widened a touch, and he said: “I can’t wait to hear about it.”

—

But when they landed, Avengers Tower was controlled chaos. Pepper had found Rio, had connected with social services, had convinced the judge in their case to have a hearing tomorrow and a temporary visitation leave for the night. Turns out, the judge had authorized visits but the social worker hadn’t been able to drive Miles back to NYC for them because her caseload was in the high 30s, so he was owed some quality time with his Mom anyway.

Rio, Dean was pleased to see, hated Tony Stark with a vengeance and barely tolerated Ms Potts, but had nothing but hugs and smiles for Miles. Dean hung back, looking out over the city only to be pulled around when Miles sprinted towards him, towing his Mom behind:

“Mom! Mom! This is Dean, my CASA, the one I mentioned, the one who we saved.” Dean blushed under his stubble; he didn’t particularly want that to be his primary qualification. But Rio seemed take it in stride, stepping forward him and offering her hand.

“I’ve heard you’ve made Miles’ life bearable during a really tough time; I appreciate that.” She said. “Have you given any thought to if your role will continue once he’s back with me?”  
  
“I haven’t, Ma’am, but I know in some cases a CASA can be assigned to a young person who’s been reunified, and there’s no role saying we can’t stay in touch once his case his closed.”

Rio smiled: “Give me your phone number, so we can make sure you two can keep an eye on each other. Will you be saying in the city long?”  
  
Dean got out his phone, low on battery now with a check-in text from Sammy saying Cas’s nurse had called him and to get back to him ASAP. He replied he was ok and would be back tomorrow, to please tell Cas that, and then refocused, giving Rio his cell and getting hers in return.

“I’m not sure, I have someone I have to get back to, I missed our date, and he’s going to be getting worried,” Dean said, distracted. “But I want to say goodbye properly.”

May nodded, eyes darting over to Tony and narrowing. “Make that goateed asshole put you up for the night in his tower of a thousand bedrooms. It’s the least he could do.” 

Dean nodded, certain he wouldn’t, but then Pepper was at his side, smoothly saying, “We’ve got a suite ready for you downstairs, as long as you need, Mr Winchester. Ms Morales, I believe we are set for the night.”

Rio didn’t say a thing, just glared at Pepper, put her arm around Miles’ shoulders, and stalk off to the elevator. Dean was a little scared and 100% appreciative that Miles had someone who got pissed-off on his behalf on his side.

The number of superheroes in the room were diminished, and Dean’s phone felt warm in his pocket. He pulled it out and dialed Cas’s nurse’s station.

The nurse carried the cordless phone over to Cas:

“Dean?” Cas asked, a little muzzy, a little worried. Dean wondered if he’d been sleeping during the day because Dean hadn’t been there for their lunch, but all the same, his stomach flooded with warmth when he spoke, a feeling he was trying to embrace now, whatever it meant. Dean didn’t usually call before coming over, just came over.

“Hey, Cas,” he said, and he could hear his voice warming like butter even in this cold, corporate office.

“Dean, what’s the matter?”

Dean knew he needed to be straight with him. Well, as straight as this Winchester got.

“I got kidnapped, Cas, but I’m alright now, Miles and Bucky rescued me —“

—

“So,” Bucky started, then paused, sipping his mango lassi. 

“So,” Dean replied, scarfing down his biryani.

Both men grinned.

—

Dean leaned back on the slightly-sticky linoleum floor, enjoying the late afternoon sun. Cas was sitting-up on his bed beside the window, looking out, doodling in an adult coloring book Dean had got for him in New York. He was nearly halfway done. 

Miles was back with his friends in school, had sent a nice note to Christal. Dean had visited him twice on the weekend, once to bring him his collection of books from Christal’s house, once just to visit. Dean had seen Bucky both times, even gone shooting with him and Steve. Next weekend, he was meeting Sammy in Manhattan and was going to let him and Bucky get to know each other a little. Bucky seemed to be coming out of that hibernation period, getting ready for new things, and Steve — Steve looked so grateful to have someone else who’d known Bucky before the Winter Solider, Dean thought he was going to make an American Icon cry. But he didn’t; he just let bought lunch and let them talk long after closing time. But for all the fun and new memories weaving together with old friendships and overwhelming complex density of New York, every Sunday evening, Dean got back in his Skyline and headed back upstate; back to Cas.

Dean was humming something, maybe one of Tego Calderón bars from one of the tracks Miles had shared with him. Castiel looked over at him. Dean smiled and Castiel smiled back.

“Hey, Cas,” Dean started, and didn’t know where to do with that. He tried for something light: “Do you think it’s confusing, that we’re called CASAs? Doesn’t make it sound like we’re calling ourselves houses?”  
  
Castiel considered, carefully selecting a yellow pencil from his new set, a present from Steve.

“Aren’t you?” He asked, “You provide stability and boundaries, some kind of shelter from the storm, some kind of permanence.”

Dean thought about it: “I think it’s just that no one spoke Spanish in the room when they named the program.”

  
Castiel nodded. “Probably true.” He said. He began to doodle outside the lines, adding wings to an illustration that had not always had them.

“Are you going to take another case?” He asked.

Dean shook his head. “Not for a while, I want to keep being there for Miles.” Castiel hummed, adding more feathers to the wings of the figure.

“Cas,” Dean started again, then paused. Then he just made himself say it: “Steve and Bucky are really good together, do you think someday, we might be like that?”

Castiel tipped his head to the side and looked at Dean. The sun was so warm and bright behind him, Dean could feel it down to his toes. Then he smiled, big and happy:  
  
“I think so, Dean; I promise I want to try.”  
  
“Me too, Cas,” Dean said, reaching up to grip the other man’s hand. “Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> As might be obvious, I work with CASA volunteers in my job. They are rarely -- if ever -- kidnapped by racist Hydra agents who think it is more likely Dean Winchester is Spider-Man than Miles Morales. Mostly, they do the hard work every single day of changing the lives of some of the most resilient, vulnerable kids and teens in our communities in the US. Seriously, if you have the time, consider being a CASA: http://www.casaforchildren.org/site/c.mtJSJ7MPIsE/b.5301309/k.9D58/Volunteering.htm


End file.
